


The Ballad of Officer Big Mac

by Dave_Dulles



Category: Dominos "Avoid the Noid" Commercials, KFC "Colonel Sanders" Commercials, McDonaldland, Papa John's Pizza Commercials
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-27 04:56:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20754695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dave_Dulles/pseuds/Dave_Dulles
Summary: Officer Big Mac grows weary of his role as Colonel Sanders' chief enforcer in the vicious wars spawned by a nationwide ban on deadly trans fats.





	The Ballad of Officer Big Mac

**Author's Note:**

> Officer Big Mac grows weary of his role as Colonel Sanders' chief enforcer in the vicious wars spawned by a nationwide ban on deadly trans fats.

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# The Ballad of Officer Big Mac

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[Dave Dulles](https://medium.com/@davedulles?source=post_page-----5a114bb04a1----------------------)

[Sep 22](https://medium.com/@davedulles/the-ballad-of-officer-big-mac-5a114bb04a1?source=post_page-----5a114bb04a1----------------------) · 31 min read

Colonel comes around the desk, gingerly fingering the beveled Brazilian rosewood, and hands me this glass he just poured after asking if it was true what he’d heard—that I was thinking of quitting. That I no longer drink.

I start to tell him he heard wrong, but don’t like the way it would sound so instead I ask, “Who told you that?”

He hands me some of his top-shelf bourbon and clinks my glass with his. “Little bird on my windowsill.”

Then he raises the tumbler, fixes his Caribbean blues on me, and grunts, “Salud.”

“Salud,” I say, and tip the lip back politely, swallow the burn.

Colonel sets down his drink and leans on the desk. He brushes away some make-believe lint from his blindingly white, clean, starched suit and before crossing his arms says, “You’ve put a lot of humps in the ground, haven’t you, Mac?”

I shrug. “Suppose so.”

Colonel strokes his goatee. It stands out like a mound of parking lot snow against his flushed pink skin. He adjusts his string tie and says, “How many men would you say you’ve killed?”

A conservative estimate puts that number in the upper thirties. That would be people I’ve knocked off personally. It doesn’t account for murders delegated to sicarios beneath me—our heavy hitters—and the halcones acting as our eyes and ears who keep us apprised of enemy movements. I pass that information up the chain of command and a few days later see the fruits of our intel splattered and soaked over the front page of the McDonaldland Times.

But men like Colonel only traffic in guns and trans-fat. In this business, ambiguity is hardly lucrative, so the casualty report for any drug lord has to be as certain as the loyalty of trusted lieutenants.

“Sixty eight,” is the figure I give him, leaving out the thirteen women and three kids popped as collateral damage. Colonel has a fierce love for women and children. He doesn’t want to know he might’ve had something to do with getting them dead. Or that the reputation his triggermen have for accuracy isn’t entirely deserved.

“Sixty eight,” says Colonel, his mouth tugging upward in a secret smile. “You ever do any dirt before workin’ for me?”

Knowing he gets a kick out of seeing my ugly all-beef mug mobilize and shift, I raise a sesame seed eyebrow, make my best country bumpkin face and say, “Aw shucks, Colonel. ‘Fore I met you I was straight as a board... Only dirt I ever touched back then was slung over my back diggin’ out turnips on daddy’s farm in El Paso.”

Colonel has a hearty laugh at this that soon descends into a fit of coughs. He’s filling his balled-up fist with tobacco black phlegm, stamping his foot to shake things loose.

I pretend to not notice, pay attention to the decorative books lining the high walls of his study. There are at least seven slotted copies of Moby Dick. It occurs to me that the bossman might be illiterate. All of the books have that fancy look too, inscribed with gold lettering, bound in various subdued hues of leather—brown and navy and livery maroon. There’s even an upscale version of Who Moved My Cheese? The whole place smells like mahogany and it makes me wonder how much it cost him to harvest and smuggle the material for that desk. I read somewhere that rosewood is an endangered species.

A lot of things are like that.

Colonel reaches into a pocket for his handkerchief, wipes his palm and dabs at the edges of his bushy mouth where a few droplets of spittle stubbornly cling. He folds the linen and folds it again, slides it back from whence it came.

“Reason I bring up so unpleasant a topic,” he says as if nothing happened, “is we’ve been having some problems of late over there in Sonora, what with certain sons of bitches hijacking my shipments.”

“You think it’s Ronaldo?”

“Doubt it,” he says. “That clown doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Too coked up. You know he used to run this town back when McCheese was mayor, but those days—well, you weren’t around back then, were you, Mac? When did you move here anyway? Was it before McCheese got clipped?”

“After,” I say.

“Hm. Some reason I was thinking I had you on payroll back then.”

“Afraid not, boss. I was just getting into the academy.”

“Yeah,” he says, a funny smile taking over his face. “I remember now. I’ll bet you didn’t have a single hair on your nuts when we first met. Zitted up from all that sunscreen…”

“Special sauce,” I interject. “Couldn’t stop sweating, sir. Puberty me hit hard.”

“Big floppy lettuce lips…” says Colonel.

“No doubt about it,” I sigh wistfully, “I was a looker.”

“Boy,” says Colonel, “you couldn’t have fucked a two-buck hooker with my dick and a handful of roofies. Face it. You weren’t attractive.”

There isn’t much to say to that so I busy myself looking for bubbles and imperfections in the bottom of the tumbler.

“No offense,” says Colonel.

“None taken.”

“I mean you do okay with the ladies these days, don’t you? Married man and all but I imagine you know a thing or two about what makes women tick. Power is quite the aphrodiasic as I’m sure you’ve discovered. And you’ve come a long a way regarding that.”

“I like to think so,” I say. “Doesn’t hurt that I play for the winning team, right?”

“That’s what I’m talking about!” says Colonel, slapping his hand against a nearby globe and making it spin. “Always liked that about you, your go-get-it attitude. No nonsense. No pity. I mean if I could bottle some of your moxie and put it on a shelf somewhere, well hell son, I wouldn’t need to sell trans.”

“I imagine they’d have to regulate moxie.”

“Oh, I’m sure those bastards would,” says Colonel. “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. When I was a young man in Shelbyville, they tried telling us we couldn’t drink whisky no more. No beer, no nothin’. Prohibition went on for thirteen goddamn years and to this day they got dry counties in Kentucky. But do you think anyone who drank before gave it up ‘cause of the law?”

I shake my head.

“Goddamn right they didn’t! Damn boozehounds turned dipsomaniacal and the teetotalers got the idea that getting soused amounted to a good time. Hell, if I’d had a brain in my head, I’d have put together some kind of operation, built me a still or got in good with those fellas who did the distributing. Took me until this latest illegalized fiasco to get my latecoming entrepeneurial ass in gear. What can I say? I had a libido to care of back then. Up to my eyeballs in jizz. Too busy chasin’ trim.”

He pours himself another drink and replaces the stopper on the hobnail bottle. He motions for me to hand him mine and I gesture kindly, no, but he’s insistent, and in the end, I don’t have much of a choice.

“Anyhow,” he says, splashing some more of that amber fluid into the glass, “we got trucks disappearing right and left. Chicken strips, frozen patties, french fries…” He delivers my bourbon and plops down in his chair. “I don’t think it’s Ronaldo, but I can’t rule him out. If it’s him doing it, he has to have help. I mean this is some real cowboy shit we’re dealin’ with now. The drivers who live say it’s masked men brandishing AKs and AR-15s. They shoot across an intersection with some big-ass truck and another one behind to block ‘em in, then close in from both sides with guns drawn to jack the product. Fuckin’ up my balance sheet, I tell you.”

He pauses for a drastic sip, seemingly anxious. Maybe depressed.

“You think McDonald is contracting the work to another organization?” I ask.

Colonel presses the cool glass to his head, eyes squeezed tight, and says, “I don’t know, Mac. I really don’t.”

He drums his fingers on the desk like he’s got something else to tell me, something in mind. A lot of times, he’ll dip them in whatever he’s having and lick them clean. Nobody knows why. Just a weird tic. This time though, he’s not doing it. No finger licking. Just drumming.

He waits until I take another sip and says, “I’m sending you over to Sonora to lend a hand. Want you to find out who’s doing this, all right?”

“You got it, boss.”

“It’s anybody besides Ronaldo,” he says, “I mean anybody…you round up your men and put down the enemy with extreme prejudice.”

“I can do that,” I say.

Colonel says, “Good.”

“And if it’s Ronaldo?” I ask.

“If it’s Ronaldo,” says Colonel. “You clear your calendar and you let me know. If it’s Ronaldo, then something has gone terribly, horribly wrong. That means we’re going to war. That means some of us ain’t comin’ back.”

He tells me to finish my beverage. To go talk to Manuel over there in the guardhouse and get filled in on the particulars.

***

I pull into the driveway at a quarter to twelve. There’s a light on in the living room, the only one in the house still burning. I don’t have to go in to know that everyone in there has already gone to bed. They wait for me, but since they don’t know if and when I’m coming around, they don’t wait up. Can’t blame them for that. It’s the life I chose. For them. For us.

I flip the cover off the security keypad and punch in this week’s access code. I look over my shoulder at the street—quiet, dark, deceptively peaceful—and listen as the complicated mechanism grinds and unwinds, taking too long to unlock, I think. The city has seen 3,000 murders in four years. The military is out in force, federales too, riding around in their black Humvees and balaclavas, picking people off the street for interrogation. Sometimes the bodies show up on the side of the road wrapped in bloody blankets. Sometimes they don’t show up at all. A goon could come after my kids just as they’re getting off the bus and they might not make it inside. The last I see of them could be on YouTube, tied up in a basement with duct tape over their mouths, some guy in a hockey mask approaching from off-camera with a chainsaw ready to rip.

I hate to think it might happen, but being a father means you have to imagine the worst case scenario, take precautions. As shit-faced as I am now, it wouldn’t do any good calling my guy over here to get the door right. Tomorrow morning, though. I am getting it fixed.

The door behind me seals itself shut and I find myself alone in the living room with only the bubbling of the aquarium to muffle my heavy breathing. I’m definitely out of shape. I can think of no other explanation for why a walk of fifteen feet should have me chasing my breath. I know I eat too much. Smoke when I drink. And whoever’s feeding Colonel stories about me giving up on booze is more or less correct. I love/hate it the way I always have, but lately it’s just not working out. I can’t go on like this. In a haze. Chemicals clouding my mind and smothering memories. I forget birthdays and anniversaries. Last year I even forgot my birthday. And when it finally came to me, I couldn’t recall how old I was.

Problem is, this is the way Colonel wants it. He’ll pay lip service to the idea of sobriety, say he needs his soldiers sharp and ready, how nobody wants to get caught with their pants down when the shit jumps off… All the same, abstinence leads to awareness, awareness leads to questions, questions…

Well, I don’t know what those lead to. I suspect you start asking yourself why it is you continue putting your ass on the line for a man who regularly berates and insults you. Some high-handed redneck in Birth Control Glasses who only runs things in McDonaldland because his pasty-faced rival is so amped on Bolivian Marching Powder he can’t feel his own toes inside those big red shoes, let alone grease the right palms or do anything at all besides snort lines off bar whores and order hits on anyone who gives more than a second’s glance to his many mistresses. The real question is how these geriatric druggies managed to survive long enough to amass influence and power when all they do is nakedly lurch from one debauched act of depredation to another, mess and massacre, offering their customers little more in return than heart-clogging hedonism and double the number of chins necessary to make a good first impression. What kind of society could countenance not just the short-sighted brutality of these witless shitbags but their incompetent management styles and severely retarded interpersonal skills?

Is what I would think were I to start asking myself certain questions. Having heard other men wonder these things aloud, I know where it leads. It’s a line of inquiry that only goes so far, a complaint once voiced that inevitably results in early, violent retirement.

I hang my bobby hat on the hook next to the fishtank and step out of my constable jacket. Toss my undershirt on the couch and my belt with it, holster too. Then I lose my pants, socks, and shoes. I stagger upstairs in my Stars and Bars boxers, feeling my way along the rail with my piece at my side. There’s a shotgun under my bed on a swivel in case somebody sneaks in and kicks down my bedroom door. It’ll be the last thing they ever kick ‘cause I’m blowing ‘em off at the knees.

The bedroom is where a lot of guys eat it, but I ain’t goin’ out like Dave fucking Thomas. Enemies of mine don’t even have to ask where the beef’s at.

I pause at the threshold of the room where my beautiful wife sleeps. Where we made love the first time. In there on that old mattress we got at—well, I guess this is a replacement—not the one we conceived our kids on. A lot of things have changed over the years. More money. Better stuff. Furniture upgrades from Scandinavia. A great new entertainment system. We kept the old house so people didn’t get suspicious. No way to explain living in a mansion when your biweekly check is under four figures. Even heading the Anti-Kidnapping Task Force doesn’t pay that well. I think she knows how I supplement our income. She knows but she can’t say. Can’t admit it.

Close enough I can smell her. The fragrant shampoo she uses on her soft yellow feathers. The jasmine conditioner applied to her vibrant sequoia brown pigtails. Corn-colored legs that go on for days, perfumed in all the right places….

I climb into bed beside her and draw near. Turn her toward me and try, in the dark, to kiss her beak. I brush stray hairs away from her face and think of how in the morning, if there’s time, we’ll talk. I’ll put on the coffee. Make her breakfast. Tell her how much I need her and how much she means to me. It’s something I should do more often. I might even give her a foot massage.

I start to drift off and the last thing I think is how none of that will likely happen. How we’re on different sides of the clock, Birdie and me. She’ll be out the door before I’m even out from under the sheets.

***

Nogales is an ugly place, a smelly hellhole I’d never visit were it not for business. Sewage boils in the sunlit street, rats chase dogs out of needle-strewn back alleyways, and everywhere I go there are dirty children with unkempt hair tugging at my wrist and exhorting me to buy Chiclets. I toss them a few centavos, the coins bouncing down a stretch of cobblestone, and silently scold myself for being so damn cheap. It’s a fine line to walk. I could give them pesos but then they might never leave. I could give them nothing and they could send an older brother around to cut out my kidney, sell that on the black market. American dollars would mark me as a big spender, blow my cover, leave me leaking my last into a rusty storm drain. Towns like this, life is cheap. I pay my pitiful guilting toll and keep on rolling.

It’s just after noon by the time I arrive at the intersection where Manuel said Colonel’s mystery man will make my acquaintance. A lot of people milling about: tourists, locals, every few minutes a stray business type dodging through the crowd, loosening his silk noose on the way to spend an hour’s pay on some quasi-legal teenage strange.

I don’t bother with faces. Urchins and merchants wear the same fake-friendly grins as lookouts and button men. Eyes tell you nothing. Truth is, idle curiosity and studied indifference are the same exact thing until about two seconds before somebody decides to put one in your brain. What I notice are hands and motion. Somebody swats at a mosquito, I see that. They clap their hands together like they want to fit a weapon in between, I’m all over it like a fly on shit.

Something is poking me in the back of the head though. My heart drops and I raise my hands, turn around slow to see what it is.

A giant purple finger extending from what looks like an enormous, pissed-off gumdrop. The eyes on this thing are huge, jaundiced, angry. The finger, I gather, is meant to resemble a gun.

“Bang,” says Big Purple.

“Holy shit,” I say. “Grimace? Is that you?”

“Hell yeah, it’s me. Who the fuck else you know look like this?”

I tell him I can’t believe it. I thought he was dead.

“Dead?” he says. “Nah, I ain’t dead, motherfucker. I got some health problems and shit. Been on disability and all that, but I ain’t dead. What kinda shit is that to say to a motherfucker? Tellin’ him you think he’s dead and shit? I don’t go around wishin’ bad shit would happen to you.”

My hands are still up from when I thought he was about to kill me, so I don’t even have to raise them in self-defense.

“Grim. Hey, man. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just telling you what I heard.”

“You heard I died?” he says.

“That was the rumor,” I say. “They said you got caught moving trans out of an evidence locker and the force retired you. Said you crawled into a bottle and ate a bullet.”

Grimace holsters his finger and halfway cocks his head. He doesn’t have a much of a neck, so it could just be my imagination, but I think he cocks his head.

But then he says, “And you believed that shit?”

“Well look, Grimace. I—”

“You think I’m goin’ out like some lilly-white bitch?”

“Of course not,” I say. “They say you ate a bullet, I figure that means somebody made it look like you ate a bullet.”

Grimace cocks one of those big black eyebrows at me and shakes out his shirt—a Kelly green Hawaiian with embroidered peach-pink flowers—the fabric rippling to cool his sweat-soaked rolls.

“I retired,” he says. “My own choice, Mac.”

“Okay,” I say. “I dig it.”

“And you can put your hands down anytime, man.”

“Cool. Cool.”

I bring my mitts down as suggested, but slowly, just in case. I don’t want to get on whatever nerve Grimace seems to have frayed with painkillers and ephedrine. The way he’s standing, how he winces whenever he makes too sudden a movement…well it’s real, no faking. I’m sure he’s been on disability like he says. And I’m equally sure his self-control when it comes to Vicodin and whatever he’s on to counter the lethargy is no better than it was with women and tequila. Obviously, he coming down off something. He appears simultaneously amped and somnambulant. Exhausted and awake the way only go-pills can make you.

“You look like hell,” he tells me.

“Had a bit much to drink,” I say, hoping my confession of helpless addiction will bridge the arm’s length approach he’s taking, score me some sympathy points. Grimace nods, untangling his thoughts, diverting his suspicion in a more useful way, those scrambled eggy eyes of his scanning the crowd and calculating the odds that any of these million and one strangers walking around has photos of us in his front pocket and a nine down the small of his back. He knows as well as I do there’s no surefire method for detecting a cartel killer. That they’re regular people with bills to pay and a special way of paying them, no different in dress and demeanor than the Average Joe, an appearance every bit as normal as mine or his.

After another few seconds of not really catching up, I finally ask, “Aren’t you supposed to take me to a warehouse or something?”

Grimace shrugs, a smirk working into the flaky flesh where his lips should be. “S’posed to do a lot of things, man…”

I don’t like the sound of that, but it would be pointless to press him for more info. It’s been all of a minute and already I’m remembering why it was I never invited this creep over to my house to hang out, have a drink, toss a few brats on the grill.

Not with Birdie nearby.

Nowhere near my fry kids.

Grimace gives me his back and lumbers down the street. Over his shoulder he calls, “Follow along, Officer. I got something needs your expert attention…”

***

What needs my expert attention, apparently, are two bloodied, beat-to-pulp perps. Grimace’s minions have these sorry bastards bound by rope to a pair of uncomfortable-looking chairs. Tied by their arms, ankles pinioned in place, they sit stiff and still, unable to exhale without putting a strain on their snapped ribs. Black and midnight blue blotches cover their faces. The skin under their eyes is bee-sting bad, swollen worse than an allergic reaction.

“These the hijackers?” I ask.

Grimace strikes a match and lights up a smoke. “Two out of three,” he says, streaming the syllables in a gray plume.

“Where’s the third?”

“Got him in seclusion at the other end of the warehouse,” says Grimace. “A little individual attention for the ringleader, you know? Break him, we find out who’s behind this.”

“How do you know he’s the one in charge?” I ask.

Grimace blazes the cherry and blows more smoke. He rolls his eyes in my general direction, not exactly at me, but enough to give me an idea of what he thinks of my question.

“You do this long enough,” says Grimace, “you know.”

He crosses his arms just as I cross mine, both of us arriving at this decision without knowing the other would too. He gives me a weird look like I planned it, the kind of expression you see someone wear when you show up at a costume party dressed like them. I think of what I’ll say if he puts it into words: his suspicion of me. His continuing distrust. That paranoid glare.

I get antsy and have to talk. “Maybe,” I say, “this is just the usual position people adopt when they’re about to torture other humans to death.”

One of the guys strapped to a chair wriggles like he can get loose somehow, get out of here. He moans while the other one hyperventilates into his duct tape, what has to be piss running down his jeans and pooling next to his sneaker.

Grimace asks what the fuck I’m talking about.

“I don’t know,” I say. It comes out like a sigh. “Honestly, I’m just making noises, Grim. It’s been a hard day’s night”

I make my way across the cold concrete and crouch down in front of the pisser. I tear the duct tape off his lips and smack him upside the head.

“What the fuck is your name, anyway?”

“Jared,” he whimpers.

“Jared what?”

“Robble,” he says.

Robble?

Grimace tells me don’t bother with this one. He says Jared is non-communicative. Retarded or something.

Robble giggles at this, clearly insane. His beady eyes dart around the cavernous interior of the warehouse. Up to the rafters and the dusty panes of glass. Into the dark corners where the weak light cannot reach.

“His name ain’t even Jared,” says Grimace. “That’s the other dude. Mister busybody-moves-a-lot over there. This motherfucker just act like a parrot. Repeat whatever he hears. I don’t think he knows nothin’ though. He just followin’ orders.”

I grab hold of his red tie, studded with two-dimensional hamburgers, and twist. My mouth is inches away from his nose, close enough he could bite me if that was his wish. He’s in prison stripes, so I wouldn’t put it past him.

“Is that true, guy? Are you some kind of second-tier sack of shit? You just gonna let chumps like this…” I point to his compadre, the real Jared, crying into his lap. “…Tell you what to do? Tell you who to be?”

He doesn’t say anything to that. Just rocks back in his chair as much as he can and when the brim of his felt hat brushes my upper bun, he opens his mouth—a rotten maw with very few teeth—and hocks a loogie right on my cheek.

More giggling after that. More giggling until I rise to my full height and slam my fist into his spitting face again and again, cracking bones and breaking vessels and capillaries until the blood freely flows and Grimace has to wrap me up in a tight bearhug and haul me away from the tipped-over freak.

Shoes scuffling over the floor, Grimace drags me along, counseling patience, peace, calm.

“Whoa! Easy, Mac!”

“Don’t easy Mac, me,” I say. “I’ll take this punk out in the street and curbstomp his goofy ass in front of a goddamn taco stand. Hamburger stealing bitchmade looney tune.”

I shake out of Grimace’s grip and give him a hard shove. Point my finger in his face to warn him then hurry over to the bloody, pissing degenerate who spat on me and blast him across his button nose like Beckham taking a shot on goal. A jet of red spatters against some nearby boxes. He goes limp. It’s all I can do not to stomp his ugly mug into something resembling a mashed Pop-Tart.

I wipe the saliva away from my cheek and dry it against my jeans. I’m lucky he didn’t get me in the eye. Guy like that, where he’s been… He wears a cape for Christ’s sake.

“Mac…” says Grimace. “Mac, man. I ain’t tryin’ to tell you what do, now. But we need him alive, you know? I mean you know what they say about dead men telling tales, don’t you?”

“They don’t,” I say.

“That’s right,” says Grimace.

“Well, I don’t see much difference between dead and crazy.”

“Mac?”

“You’ve had what—twelve hours to work on this?”

Grimace nods.

“Half a day and all you got out of him is that his partner’s name is Jared. No positive ID. No clear motive for why these jackholes commandeered Colonel’s trucks at gunpoint. Who’s paying them. What this is all about.”

Grimace sort of gulps.

“You’ve been knocking them around?”

“All last night,” says Grimace.

“You tried electroshock?”

Grimace rubs the back of his head. “Not yet…”

“Not yet? How ‘bout castration?”

“Cas what?”

“Cutting off their nuts, man.”

“Aw,” says Grimace. “Goddamn, Mac. You serious?”

“Serious?” I say. “Am I serious? Grim, what the fuck do you think this is exactly? Are we playing games here? Is this some kind of joke to you? Do you have the faintest fucking clue what these animals would do to your family if roles were reversed?”

He furrows his brow at me. “My family?”

I don’t have time to explain the ins and outs of it to him. I grab Jared—the real Jared—by his slobbery chin and tilt back his head until I’m staring into his weak watery eyes.

“What’s your name?” I say. “The full thing. And don’t tell me Robble.”

“Fogle.”

“Fogle?”

“Yeah,” he sniffs.

“That’s a shit name, Jared. It doesn’t sound real.”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Don’t be sorry for that. Be sorry for jacking Colonel’s trucks, you dumb fuck. Did you really think you were gonna get away with it?”

He shrugs, tries to avoid my gaze. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. Do you know who carved that graffiti into the driver’s chest with a commando knife?”

“No.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Jared.”

“I don’t know!” he cries.

I squeeze his chin as hard as I can. I squeeze until I can feel his teeth begin to loosen and a low moan crawl out of his throat.

“Do you want to find out what your severed pecker tastes like?”

He bursts into tears. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know what you’re asking!”

“Somebody took a knife, Jared…they used it to cut into an innocent man’s chest, to carve him up like a chicken, OK? They wrote something in his flesh. They wrote ‘Eat Fresh,’ Jared. Eat Fresh. Like he was a piece of meat. Like somebody was supposed to eat him. You know what it’s like to have somebody want to kill and eat you? Do you have any idea?”

Jared tries shaking his head. “No,” he says. “I don’t know…”

“That’s right, Jared, you don’t. All you know is what it’s like to be on the better end of that energy transfer transaction. Because you’re a predator, aren’t you? Big scary bogeyman. Make people afraid. You like to kill, huh? You like to eat? How long has it been since you’ve had something to gnaw on, Jared? Hours, I’ll bet. I can tell you used to be pretty fat, too. Maybe you’ve got a thing against trans? Maybe that’s why you jacked those trucks and killed the driver. It’s about money, I’ll bet, but I’ll bet it’s also about revenge. That’s what you’re really hungry for, isn’t it? Vengeance.”

“No,” says Jared, shaking his head. “I’m a nice guy, I swear.”

“Nice guy,” I say. “That’s rich, Robble.”

“Fogle.”

“Like it matters. You’re not a nice guy, you shit-bird. You’re a five minute drive from being a greasy stain on the highway. We’ll drop you off an overpass in front of a fucking dumptruck. Come to think of it, that gives me a great idea. Grimace!”

“Yeah, Mac?”

“Where are those trucks at? The ones they jacked?”

“Around back,” says Grimace.

“Send some of your boys around to unload them.”

“Unload the trucks? What, the burgers, the chicken?”

“All of it,” I say. “Every last morsel. I want you to bring it around here, set up a table, make this guy eat his mistake.”

“Eat his…let me get this straight. You want me to—”

“I want you to feed him the truck he stole, Grim. Bite by bite.”

Grimace turns kind of green. “His stomach, if he does that—”

“I know what it will do, Grimace. I’ve seen Se7en. That’s what we’re punishing here. That’s the message we trying to send. You steal from the Colonel, you’re a glutton for punishment. It’s the sign we’ll hang over his neck when we dangle his bloated ass over the bridge.”

“We can’t feed him the whole truck,” says Grimace.

“We can try.”

“I don’t know,” says Grimace. “I don’t think Colonel’s gonna like—”  
“Man, fuck what you think, Grimace. Nobody pays you for that, you dickless eggplant.”

“Hey,” says Grimace. “What the fuck, Mac?”

I can’t be in this room any longer. Have to leave. Get some fresh air, get away from the smell—the stench—of twisted fear and foolish half-measures.

I brush past Grimace, bumping shoulders, don’t even look.

“Take care of it,” I say. “Cram that shit into him any way you can. Same thing goes for pissboy. And keep squeezing the leader.”

Grimace shouts after me, “I’m not doin’ it, Mac! There’s other ways, man! Not some kind of FUCKIN’ ANIMAL.”

I keep walking, eyes forward. He’ll do it, all right.

Or it’s his ass in the hot seat.

***

I don’t know why I thought the air outside the warehouse would be any more fresh than what I was breathing inside. The minute I step out the creaky metal door and slam it behind me my lungs fill with dust and dirt. Exhaust fumes from idling cars at the checkpoint tear my eyes and corrido music lousy with accordions and polka influence assaults my acoustic sensibilities. There is no peace in Nogales. Coming here was a bad idea.

I wander the streets looking for a bar where I might get drunk but not stabbed, somewhere a gringo is, if not exactly welcome, then at least safe. I walk under signs extolling the superior drinkability of Bud Light and an old man hunched over some double XXs urging me to “stay thirsty,” calling me his friend.

Something is so deeply wrong with all of this I don’t even know where to begin. Grimace, for one, shouldn’t be in charge of the investigation. His story doesn’t add up. First he’s on disability and then he’s retired? It makes no sense. And those two jokers he’s been interrogating, who haven’t told him anything besides their names—probably not even their real names—what’s with them? Who hires a bunch of amateurs to pull off a heist like that? Leaving bloody nonsequitors in the drivers’ chests. Eat Fresh? Pizza Pizza?

I don’t believe for a second that Lil’ Caesar is behind this. It was shoddy work—definitely Caesar’s calling card—but so poorly executed I’d have to say it’s intentional. Almost like somebody wanted it to go wrong.

There’s a pharmacy across the street where I can score any drug known to man. It occurs to me they might even have some sodium pentothal, which I’ve never used before but have heard good things about. I suppose I’ll check it out at least, try the truth serum on Mister Robble. I can always get loaded later if that doesn’t pan out. Or score something even less licit—sticky and herbal—as that seems to be where I’m headed, what I’m wanting, this particular night.

That’s the idea anyway—the last thing I remember thinking as a van pulls up beside me, the door slides open, and a bag comes down over my head.

***

I always wondered why the people I picked up off the street never fought back. For years, I did this: trundling along in some nondescript cargo van, gloves on my hands, hunched close to a tinted window in wait. The door would roll back and I’d grab whoever it was needed grabbing, drag them kicking but mostly confused into the space we’d cleared of seats and slam them down on the steel bed, snarling at them or beating them into submission, then softly explaining that they were not to escape, that we had them and they would do as we say or else. And all the time thinking, If they just tried a little… All they’d have to do is duck the bag, bite my wrist, and run.

Thinking, It can’t possibly be this easy, can it?

What I know now is that getting nabbed nothing to do with hard or easy. It’s simply a matter of time and intent. Of knowing that something will happen and having the wherewithal, the mental preparedness to react in an appropriate fashion. Understand that it’s time to fight. Time to flee. Time to do something, anything at all, to get away from the hands in the van.

And this time—my turn—it’s becoming quite apparent that I am not getting away.

They tell you at Academy to pay attention to where you were when the kidnapping took place. The bag-over-the-head routine is industry standard, so the instructors tend to emphasize maintaining an awareness of movement and direction, given that you can’t see, hear, or smell. The focus is on counting between stops, feeling which way your body leans when the vehicle goes left or right, and for how long. If you can do this, you at least have a shot at retracing your steps should you get lucky enough to actually escape. If you can’t, you’ll probably be recaptured. That’s when the real fun begins.

We round a corner at what I’d estimate is forty miles per hour. I lurch sideways and smash my patties against the wheel-wheel hump. One of my captors curses at me and drags me back to a seated position, his fist bunching up my shirt in back, an open palm whapping me in the chin. I don’t know what to tell him. There’s no point in saying sorry. I’m wearing cuffs and I can’t see.

We drive around for maybe three minutes, taking twenty or so turns in that time. It’s obvious we aren’t far from where we started, that these guys are green, novices. They want me to think we’re going someplace I can’t imagine. Like we’re cutting through back alleys and secret entrances and I’m gonna end up at a subterranean lair where nobody would ever suspect. The reality is more mundane. A safehouse usually looks no different than any other. On the outside, that is. A lot of times, the basements are reinforced, the walls stuffed with extra insulation. Proofing for sound is important, considering most people’s tendency to get loud once you start pruning their fingers.

The brakes squeal and the van grinds to a halt. Someone throws open the door and the guy with his hand bunched in my shirt forces me out. Strong arms on either side loop through mine and I feel a rifle muzzle poke me in the spine and prod me forward. We crunch through gravel and pass through a doorway, the air changing as we do, still hot but not so dry, more like a kitchen than a desert. And it definitely is, because I can hear water boiling, vegetables being chopped, and there’s a strong odor of spices—garlic and basil.

If this restaurant employs any heroes, they’ve apparently called in sick. Nobody says a word as I’m whisked through into the next room and down a flight of stairs.

They sit me down and yank off the bag.

I’m at a candlelit table covered in white cloth. Wine glasses. Red napkins. A bottle of wine between me and a dark-looking individual with oily, almost coiffed hair. The wine sloshes gently in a nice, half-empty bottle. A little amber. A little garnet.

The dark one reaches across the table and attempts to pour me a glass. “Vino?” he offers.

“No,” I say. “Thank you, but no.”

“Are you sure?” He raises a sable eyebrow threaded with gray hairs. “This is Falerno del Massico, Mac. A very fine wine derived from the Aglianico grape of central Campania.” He examines the bottle as if learning something new.

“The Romans used to drink this,” he says. “It pairs well with lamb.”

“Sounds delicious,” I tell him. “I’m trying to quit.”

“Yes,” he says. “I believe I heard something to that effect.”

I nod as politely as I can while Mister Bigshot swirls and sniffs. “A shame about your newfound sobriety,” he says. “This batch is especially good. Plummy yet restrained. I detect a certain…grassy herbaceousness.”

“Hm.”

He tents his fingers together and fixes me with a hard stare. “Do you know who I am?”

I venture a guess. “Caesar?”

The dark one smiles and keeps on staring. “Nothing so grand, I assure you. My name is John, though some people call me Papa.”

“You mean your kids?”

“I don’t know my children,” says Papa. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink, Mac?” He gestures at his lamb. “To eat?”

“I’m on a diet,” I say. “This food looks too fancy. And my hands,” I remind him, “are tied.”

“Not even a bloomberger?” says Papa. He seems to forget who he’s talking to. Or maybe he’s just being a dick.

I shake my head. “I might be a lot of things,” I say. “But I’m not low enough to go cannibal.”

“You know, McCheese used to eat those bloombergers. He’s actually the one who suggested the city institute the ban on trans fats. His sister-in-law’s company picked up the contract to supply McDonaldland schools with healthier alternatives.”

“That’s an interesting fact,” I say.

“Well, you can learn a lot of valuable life lessons if you just sit and listen. Speaking of…” He reaches into his jacket and I take what might be my last breath.

Except it’s not a gun. It looks like a pack of playing cards. He lays them out in front of me, not cards at all, but pictures.

Of Birdie.

Of Colonel.

My mouth goes dry. “What,” I say, “is this?”

“I think you know,” says Papa.

“No,” I say. “I don’t.” What it looks like is a series of snapshots capturing Birdie in an evening gown exiting a limousine with Colonel, him taking her hand, the two of them walking into a fine dining establishment known as Soba. It’s Japanese or something. With a little French. What they call Fusion.

Papa flips over the photograph that had been face down: a candid moment between Colonel and my wife. His fingers on her hand again. Their eyes closed. His mouth…

“You all right there, Mac?”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you? It looks like you’re a little hot, actually. Starting to sweat… Maybe you need a handkerchief?”

“No.”

“It’s a shame,” says Papa. “The way some bosses act. Liberties they take with their employees’…assets.”

I try to swallow the lump in my throat but it won’t go down. Try to think how this could have happened and when. How long it’s been going on and why she would do this. If she was willing. If she’d been threatened.

I want to believe that’s what it is.

I’d like to think she had no choice.

“They look pretty happy, don’t they?”

I wonder if I could break out of these cuffs. If my hands would come off at the wrist were I to try. I’ve never heard of a man doing that. Or one man beating another one to death with his bloody stumps.

I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility, though.

“Mac, I’ve got a proposition for you.”

“I’m all ears,” I say. He’s gonna ask me to come work for him. And I’m going to say yes.

“How’d you like to come work for me?”

“I’d have to give that some thought.”

“I understand. It’s a big decision,” says Papa. “But you’re…open to the idea?”

I can’t stop looking at the restaurant scene. Thinking back on some of the things Colonel’s said. That off-handed remark: “Little bird told me…”

Taunting me even then.

I meet Papa’s eyes. “I’m open. I just need to know how soon I can plug this sonofabitch.”

Papa smiles.

I ask if he finds it funny. My predicament.

He shakes his head, avoiding my gaze for the first time, pretending to find the wine super interesting.

“It’s not that,” he says. “I was just thinking…about Sanders?”

“Yeah?”

He looks up. The smile is now gone.

“Did you know he’s never even been to Kentucky?”

***

They kick me out of the van at about fifteen miles per hour with “fair warning.”

“Nothing personal,” according to one of Papa’s goons, “just gotta make it look like we ain’t on good terms here.”

I don’t question the logic as he plants his boot in my face. I just duck and cover my head as best I can. And the rolling takes care of itself.

After that, I lay in the gutter for a few minutes, thinking about my life and how awful it is. Weighing options. Realizing that all this was ordained by powers I cannot possibly challenge or comprehend. The hijacking was a ruse to get me in the vicinity so I could be picked up. I’m a pawn like always. Going to work for Papa John is really no different than doing dirt for the Colonel. The only thing that changes is maybe Papa won’t fuck my wife.

Then again, maybe he will.

I find my feet and dust myself off. Stagger towards the warehouse…where a door hangs open.

I reach for my piece and remember that Papa’s boys confiscated it in the van and never returned it. I’m starting to wonder what good kicking me out the van did if all that happens now is somebody shoots me dead.

I get low and creep through the doorway, keep it ninja while I stealth shuffle from shadow to wall to corner to—

Grimace. Laid out next to the chairs where I ordered him to feed Robble and Jared the contents of the truck. A hole in his head. Great big pool running red from him to them. Thawed hamburger and chicken scattered in every direction, bodies and meat buzzing with flies.

I roll the big man over and hike up his khakis. As expected, he never had a chance to draw the revolver strapped to his leg. I always told him it was a bad idea keeping that gun there. He couldn’t tie his own shoes for God’s sake, why he wore sandals. No time to bend over his belly and pull it before the killer put his brains on the floor.

I close Grimace’s eyes and make for the back of the building. The front door’s open because he wanted me to think that’s how he left. I don’t buy it. The state he must’ve been in after hours of getting the shit kicked out of him… Who walks the main strip looking like that? What cabbie in his right mind sees a mangled corpse struggling down the street and says to himself, “There he is. That’s my fare.”

No. He doesn’t want to be seen.

I jog out the back with the steel extended, catch sight of him as he comes up on the dumpster at the end of the block, another fifty feet until he disappears into another alley. A weird looking guy, big long…ears…sticking out of his head.

He doesn’t hear me as I draw near.

Not until I cock the hammer.

Not until I say, “Easy, now. Nice and easy… Drop whatever weapons you have and turn and face me.”

A pistol clatters at his feet. Big. Red. It couldn’t be…

And it isn’t. His face—what I can see of it under the mask anyway—is pale between the bruises but not nearly that neat shock of white that’s Ronaldo’s trademark. His nose is flattened with lots of red crusted underneath, but there’s nothing clownish about it. The man is short, sleight of build, and covered from head to toe in a tight rubber suit. There’s a massive capital N located in the center of his chest.

I ask him what it means. What it stands for.

“Noid,” he says.

He looks at the gun. “You planning to kill me?”

“You sure didn’t show any mercy for your comrades,” I say. “Offed Grimace. I probably should.”

He licks his lips, hopeful. “But you’re thinkin’ maybe not.”

“I’m thinking I need to know where you stand.”

He nods.

“So I’ve got a question for you.”

“OK…”

“How do you feel about chicken?”

“I’m not really a fan,” he says.

“Uh huh. And what about pizza?”

“I don’t like it unless it’s burned.”

“Toasted?”

“Incinerated.”

“Mister Noid,” I say, “you and I have a lot to discuss.”

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##  [Dave Dulles](https://medium.com/@davedulles?source=follow_footer--------------------------follow_footer-)

#### Flash fiction. Short stories. A novel in progress.

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